


Wildfire in Three Acts

by Senket



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Emotional Abuse, M/M, Physical Abuse, Twisted, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:38:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senket/pseuds/Senket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim comes home from the interrogation room; Sebastian is ready for Jim, but not for the whirlwind that follows him through the door. Preparing for Reichenbach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wildfire in Three Acts

** -Catching Fire- **

When Jim Moriarty returns from a three-day stint in an interrogation cell ‘just for the fun of it, they’ve nothing to hold me there,’ Moran is prepared. He always knows where Jim is, he tracks him with a phone and with memory and with staff, with the hard-won knowledge of how Moriarty behaves, at least as much as anyone can predict how he behaves.

He tracks the car from the security cameras in the parking garage and in the freight elevator, watches Jim’s closed eyes and Jim’s twitching fingers, no doubt eager to get out of that three-day suit and fix his three-day hair, watches Jim’s twisted smile and the way Jim is ignoring his escort driver. Watches Jim’s eyes flicker open and makes it to the door with precise timing just as Jim arrives.

Sebastian is ready for Jim to come home, ready to put the final touches on Sunday’s plan(s), but he is not at all ready for the whirlwind that follows Jim through the door.

It slams up against him, all manic fire behind dark eyes and Moriarty’s rippling laugh, claws in  his shoulders and the pressure of hard elbows against his ribs, teeth in his neck and in his jaw and in his lips. Jim smells like three days in a cell and feels like an eel, twisting against Sebastian’s fingers, away from his fingers, closer to his fingers, unsteady and unhinged and impossible to prepare for. He licks the impression of his teeth in Sebastian’s shoulder, worries at it with the tip of his tongue until blood beads out of each puncture, sucks it all into his mouth with a groan.

Sebastian pushes him away and Jim staggers back a step- Sebastian is stronger no matter the case- but Jim just smiles, teeth and insanity, and slaps Sebastian across the face with all the force he can muster. Sebastian doesn’t have a chance to catch his breath before Jim presses against him again and Sebastian finally, belatedly notices how jagged his nails are, sharp and split when they’re normally so pristine.

Jim doesn’t give him time to notice anything else, fisting a hand in Sebastian’s hair and pulling him down for a harsh, bloody kiss. One moment Jim’s fingers are leaving welts down the nape of his neck and the next he feels a sharp and focused pain in his bicep.

Sebastian shoves Jim away again and the man tumbles back hard enough to fall over. Jim throws his head back and laughs, loud and high and painful in his ears. Sebastian flinches as Jim’s voice resounds in the room, reflects off the walls and through the air, intensifies all around him. He checks the damage with calloused fingers, finds a needle, plunger depressed, throws it at Jim, the man still shaking with laughter.

“What the fuck did you do?” Sebastian gapes, his words slurring together. He tries to blink the blur out of his eyes, squints and teeters sideways. Jim is up in a flash, moulding himself against Sebastian’s front, sinking his claws in, and doesn’t at all cushion his fall when Sebastian’s knees give out and he falls backwards.

“I got in touch with Adler’s supplier.” Jim grins frenziedly and Sebastian dizzily wonders how he’s never noticed just how long and sharp Jim’s teeth are, the teeth of a cannibal. Jim climbs over him, tears his shirt open and leans down to dig those perfect, sharp, predator’s teeth into Sebastian’s chest, dragging his nails down Sebastian’s ribs- sinks his teeth in like he’s trying to eat Sebastian’s heart. “I thought it would make for a lovely night.”

He barely notices when the bite of fingernails turns into the sting of a knife, blearily focused on the manic expression in Jim’s dark eyes, the first stirrings of a long-dormant volcano, smoke coming out of that perpetually smiling mouth, his lips wet with the gleam of sweat and blood.

Sebastian can’t flinch when the blade in Jim’s hands twists into his skin, digs in far enough to do serious damage. He sighs in protest and struggles to pull his arm out of Jim’s grasp because Jim isn’t being careful but Jim only tuts and digs his thumb into the forming wounds, bends his head down to suck the lines clean. Sebastian stares at the purple line of bruises down Jim’s spine and shakes but he can’t tell why.

When Jim sits up again, hips slotted over Sebastian’s, he strokes his fingers loving down Sebastian’s arm, twitches and groans and rolls his hips, arches back. Sebastian tries to concentrate over the smell of blood but all he can see is Jim, Jim’s bloody hands and Jim’s tongue licking Sebastian’s blood off Jim’s wrist. Jim leaning forward to kiss him, his own blood in his mouth and Jim, Jim’s eyes still open, Jim’s eyes still dark and bleak and empty and Jim, Jim on fire, Jim so fucking bloody destroyed and so, so very _perfect_.

Sebastian reaches for Jim but he feels heavy, breathing vapours and carbon monoxide, the smoke drifting out of Jim’s mouth and Jim’s eyes. His fingers drift against Jim’s hot skin and tangle into Jim’s red sleeve and Jim laughs and laughs and laughs, rolls Sebastian onto his stomach and plunges down his knife.

** -Burning Up- **

When Sebastian wakes he can barely move his fingers. He smells like blood and sweat and feels like he’s on fire. The night is a distant, fuzzy memory of Jim’s teeth and Jim’s laugh, Jim’s nails hard in his ribs and Jim’s knife biting between his shoulder blades. Moving feels like plunging into coals but he’s dealt with worse before.   
Sebastian tries to get to his feet but they wobble unsteadily beneath him- he falls back down on his hands and crawls to the bathroom, grips the sink to ease himself back up with a strangled grunt of pain, blood oozing from the twisting wounds on his back. Sebastian reaches into the cabinet behind the mirror, his hands trembling uncontrollably, and grasps a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He has to use his teeth, because the lines in his left wrist are so deep he can’t keep his fingers closed tightly enough around the cap to twist it open.

Sebastian swallows thickly and clenches his teeth, but even then he can’t bite back the hiss as he washes the blood away with alcohol, snatches up a white flannel (they’re all white, he can’t afford to not notice if one of them is dirty) and scrubs his flayed arm clean.

Sebastian can’t control his sudden exhalation when the lines twist into letters, a single word clear and bold, stretching from elbow to wrist, and it’s possibly the most beautiful and the most fucked-up thing he’s ever seen in his life.

‘MORIARTY’

He sinks until his forehead presses against the porcelain of their sink, his toes curling against the white-tile floor, breathes in and out carefully. His shoulders quickly start burning in protest, the line of his spine flaring in pain where it meets his back. He remembers, if distantly, Jim’s lips pressed against the wounds in his back, not moving but nearly reverent as Jim breathed in and out, steady but quick, rocking his hips.

Sebastian straightens, eyes himself in the mirror with a hard gaze and calls himself pathetic for wanting so much to see it.

He steps into the shower without shedding his trousers, his shirt having long been cut away by Jim’s devious fingers, rests his forehead against the wall as too-hot water beats down on him, harsh against reddening skin. He shuts the spray off when it drains away at a steady pale-pink and stands in the shower, shivering and wet, for a full minute before stepping in front of the mirror, twisting to see.

Sebastian Moran howls and shatters his fist against his reflection, hates like an inferno and hurts like a wildfire.

There, carved between his shoulder-blades, is a different name.

That name is ‘SHERLOCK.’

** -Going Out- **

When Jim deigns to turn up again, fresh from getting his nails done by a professional, playing gay hairdresser out with his girlfriends or something equally crass, Sebastian is taking whiskey shots one after the other, expression twisted in a grimace that is more ache than alcohol. Strips of medical tape rise like white stripes over his shoulders, close around his ribs like bone fingers, anchoring a long white bandage over the brand on his back. It’s triply thick, white on white on white; he can’t bear to think of that brand melting through it, bright red and everything he chokes on. Contrastingly, the name in his arm is only covered by wispy gauze, blood oozing through and turning spidery letters into bold font. Sebastian drags his thumb over the jagged lines of Moriarty’s second R, throws a shot back before slumping forward again.

Jim slithers in, sheds his persona as he sheds his clothes, a mask, a skin. He smiles and that smile is poisonous, he laughs and that laugh is a vacuum, the black space between the flickering blue of ionized flame. Jim climbs over the couch to Sebastian, bare and hot against Sebastian’s naked arm, and his eyes are black, black as coal, cool by sight and blistering to touch.

Jim laughs and snarls and bites. He grips Sebastian’s hair and forces it down between Sebastian’s knees, tears away the bandage in one move. His presses his lips against the wounds, carves out the word with his tongue, forces the flesh apart, sucks blood out of the bend in the S.

Sherlock, it says.

SHERLOCK.

Jim digs his fingernails into MORIARTY and kisses SHERLOCK until his mouth is jewel red and Sebastian feels sick, sick with shame and sick with hatred and sick with this great, roiling ache, ashes and dust.

Sebastian starts to shake and Jim peels himself away, turns for the bedroom. Sebastian forgoes the shot glass and drinks straight from the bottle until it’s empty, throws it against the wall and sinks to the floor and hates and hates and hates until he just hurts.

Jim reappears looking like Jim, his eyes black and his heart black and his voice carbon monoxide, odorless and colourless, invisible but poisonous all the same. He looks vicious when he looks pristine, and he looks all the worse now for the fleck of blood at the corner of his lip.

He’s already affixing his cuff-links, onyx set in silver, and his sneer is anything but kind. “Ready for Sunday?”

Sebastian flinches and looks away, because he can feel the heat on his face and he can see the inferno, flames sparking and jumping and eating up everything in sight, eating up the black sky. He’s standing on the edge of a cliff and that cliff used to be home, he used to watch all the little people from up here, watch them live like so many distant, removed insects, but not anymore, now he just watches the fire as it hurtles towards him and that day is coming, that day, rushing towards him, and on that day he’ll have to chose-

On that day he’ll stand on the edge of the cliff, Jim’s fire voracious and white-hot, whipping closer and closer, crisping his skin, and he’ll have to chose: let the fire devour him or step back into the empty darkness beyond and wait to be dashed against the rocks.

  



End file.
